Fedora Core 12 Not Booting

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Howard Gibson <hgibson-MwcKTmeKVNQ at public.gmane.org>

|    I have just installed Fedora Core 12 on my desktop, and it is not 
|    booting.  I am using the ext4 filesystem on my root partition.

If I remember correctly, Fedora 12's GRUB does not understand ext4.
You probably need an ext3 /boot partition for GRUB and the kernel etc.

Of course you may have done that.  Then, as others have suggested, the
ordering of drives by the BIOS and GRUB might be different and
screwing things up.

Something I find handy: a bootable GRUB disk (floppy, CDROM, DVDROM,
or USB (I presume)).  That lets me boot a system that has a confused
or corrupted GRUB.

|  I 
|    have an old IDE drive as a backup, and a 500GB SATA drive as my 
|    primary.  I am using the SATA drive, partition /dev/sdb1 for booting.  
|    I see the BIOS messages, then I get a gray, blinking cursor.
| 
|    I have tried the rescue DVD, and I can activate a command line with 
|    `chroot /mnt/sysimage`.  I can see stuff installed on my drives.
| 
|    Does this look familiar to anyone?

One machine that I got confused had two hard drives and the BIOS was
willing to boot from either.  I left Vista on the original disk
and installed Fedora on the other.  I'd select between them by telling
the BIOS which to boot.

I did this because Vista seemed to throw a fit if the MBR were
altered.  I didn't want to touch its disk.

The Fedora installation thought that its disk was the second (sdb) but
GRUB thought it was the first (hd0 in those days).  So the Fedora
installation set GRUB up in a way that didn't work.

I booted from my GRUB CDROM, loaded Fedora, and edited
/boot/grub/grub.conf (or maybe ran grub-install with some arguments).
>From then on, all worked.

The two GRUB commands to remember are
root: to set the partition of interest
configfile: to use a GRUB configuration file on the partition of
   interest
Using configfile is a lot easier than typing in all that bumpf.
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